Which Attachment Template Do You Draw From?
Most of us know, by the time we’re a teenager, how crazy making it feels to traverse the on-going tension between the two polarities of both seeking to bond, attach and belong along side the seemingly opposite impulse of seeking freedom, autonomy and space.
Navigating attachment in relationships is a continual dance between these two states and needs.
Do you know your attachment tendencies when you feel anxious or stressed by the fear abandonment, rejection, or engulfment?
Do you have tools and resources to communicate and educate your loved ones about your attachment template and impulses to protect and connect?
What is attachment theory and what does it reveal about us?
We all share a universal need to feel secure and to know that we belong in order for us to thrive and be in our authentic power. Attachment theory touches our foundational beliefs about love and safety. It reveals our attachment template, which informs how we navigate the vulnerable needs related to feeling connected to our sense of belonging.
Early in life, we learn about when and if it feels safe to anchor in our bodies and in our relationships to others. Based on what our primary relationships mirror, we develop secure or insecure attachment states, which will influence our relationship blueprint from here onward.
Attachment wounds are areas of deep vulnerability for each of us. Being educated about why we do what we do to bond builds awareness, self-compassion, and a greater perspective into our relationship triggers.
Studying attachment is rich terrain for healing and integrating personal patterns of anxiety, control, and self-protection. Many behaviors associated with our attachment template can be the drivers of self-hatred, jealousy, controlling others, withdrawal, blame and judgment.
A universal need to bond and belong
We all need to know that we belong and that we’re part of the whole. We all need safe places to feel seen, loved, and held, no matter how messy and unbuttoned we are.
My desire is to normalize, and bring awareness to our basic need to attach and experience a secure connection.
We live in a world that peppers us with messages of how we should be, which often goes against our authentic needs and desires. Advertising campaigns convey that we’re not enough as we are, while suggesting that a product or service will fix our inadequacies and brokenness. And closer to home, we may suffer from the conflicts that occur in our most intimate relationships when people try to change us into the fantasy of who they want us to become for them.
The need to change, judge, and control one another isn’t usually linked to an intention to hurt each other. These fear-based, reactive behaviors are a desperate plea from our attachment template to satisfy our needs for security and stability.
Exploring our attachment template is an opportunity to find compassion for ourselves and others, and to consciously embrace a radically truthful connection with ourselves, all living beings, and the planet herself.
An overview of attachment theory
Attachment theory is based on infant and interpersonal neurobiology research. This framework is designed to map the complexity of relationship patterns and the specific strategies we use to navigate our needs for connection, safety, and belonging in relationship.
When our early attachment needs aren’t being consistently met, we interpret, and subsequently believe, that connection is not reliable. As a result, we will call upon our defense mechanisms to protect our vulnerability or assuage our anxiety and fear. We typically develop either a pattern of self-reliance, to avoid the pain of rejection and abandonment, or a pattern of becoming overly dependent on others to meet our needs and save us from the pain of our perceived aloneness.
In other words, our attachment template is constructed during our early life experiences. It becomes our relational operating system as an adult.
Two primary attachment states
There are two primary attachment states, secure-based and fear-based. We tend to orient towards different attachment states based on our external relational environment as well as our inner state.
secure-based attachment states
If our primary state in relationship is one of secure-based attachment states, then it’s likely that in early life, we experienced intimate relationships as safe, reliable, and trustworthy.
When we needed attunement and connection, it was available, consistent, and loving enough for us to learn that we’re worthy of being loved. If early attachment bonds were formed in this way, then as adults we hold a secure trust in connection, with ourselves and others, even when conflict or distance arises. This allows us to self-soothe and seek connection simultaneously without a great deal of anxiety.
Fear-based attachment states
If we tend to draw more from fear-based attachment states, then we might have experienced early attachment as unstable and inconsistent.
There are many factors that lead to this attachment state. Fear-based attachment states can be due to our attachment figures inconsistently attuning and responding to our needs. It can be influenced by early trauma such as emergency medical care that was overwhelming to our system and left us feeling alone and disconnected from our source of nourishment.
Our attachment states aren’t fixed
True to any emerging field of study, attachment theorists present diverse views, which is part of what makes this material so dynamic.
Some attachment theorists have curated a framework that feels compartmentalizing and even pathologizing to me. I personally believe that we don’t operate based on one attachment style that’s fixed in all cases at all times. This is why I prefer the frame of attachment states, instead of a fixed attachment styles, because it leaves room for us to orient towards these states as coming and going forms of protection, rather than who we are.
We’re complex beings with a wide array of responses. We may feel soothed by, and experience secure attachment with certain relationships that feel safe, consistent, and loving. Other relational situations may trigger us into a state of dis-regulation or disempowerment, which leads us to protect our vulnerability through responses of anxiety, avoidance, or push-pull.
If you’re anything like me, when a fear-based attachment state arises in you, you may have felt that something is broken or shameful about you. But these adaptive strategies are simply our survival method to cope with a lack of safety and security in relationship.
Together we can educate and empower ourselves by curiously exploring the complex ways we navigate our need for safety, connection, and independence in our adult relationships.
Mapping your attachment states
Our attachment templates play an important role in emotional regulation, giving us a means to manage stress and fear. When we threatened or challenged, our attachment system becomes activated to alleviate distress and restore a felt sense of security.
Our stress response will vary based on many factors, including the type of relationship, such as parental, child, lover, friend and colleague. To learn more about how attachment states take root within us, read my article: How Does Our Attachment Template Form?
In this article, we’ll focus on how attachment states manifest in romantic relationships.
SECURE-BASED TEMPLATES
Some templates have a secure belief of “I’m safe to be me and I know that I’m loved, and when conflict arises, I’ll find my way through because love is safe and reliable. My life and existence matters.”
There is a trust in the ability to rupture in connection and repair without losing the relationship.
If we draw upon secure states, it doesn’t mean we don’t get triggered, because we do and we will. The differentiating factor here is how we respond when distance or challenge arises.
Adults who orient more often towards secure states of attachment hold an inherent trust in relationships being resilient and trustworthy. When a partner disengages with us, we can self-soothe and reach towards the partner with more curiosity than threat. There is enough space inside to pursue a way back into connection rather than spiral out into a fear state.
With secure states of attachment, we trust relationship, even if we temporarily go out of connection.
FEAR-BASED TEMPLATES
Some states are more heavily woven with fear and anxiety. In which case, when we feel threatened in relationship, anxiety rises and adaptive strategies ignite to protect us and to seek resolution to our fear and sense of separation.
There are three variations of fear states: anxious, avoidant, and combined anxious/avoidant.
1) ANXIOUS
When connection feels threatened, an anxious state will lean towards the person or situation for further connection in hopes to resolve stress and anxiety.
In romantic relationships, when stress occurs, the anxious voice may sound like, “When people I love go away, I think it’s my fault and I feel anxious and scared. Until I feel their attention and reassurance of love again, I can’t concentrate. I feel consumed by the sense of loss and aloneness.” Stress may ignite an existential question, “Does my existence matter when you don’t love me and see me?”
2) AVOIDANT
When connection feels threatened, an avoidant state will lean away from connection to manage levels of stress and overwhelm.
In romantic relationships, when stress occurs, the avoidant voice may sound like, “I need time alone. When I feel engulfed by your needs and wants, I panic and seek to withdraw so I can regulate my stress.”
As adults, this can look like withdrawing into our cave. It can appear as ghosting, when we stop responding to people’s texts and attempts to engage with us. Or through a variety of additional forms of distancing such as breaking sexual agreements by being with another person, or lying to our partner to create space without even realizing what we’re doing.
We unknowingly, or sometimes intentionally, deploy tactics that create separation and hurt between one another.
3) COMBINED ANXIOUS/AVOIDANT
This pattern is a weaving of both anxious and avoidant simultaneously. In romantic relationships when stress occurs, the anxious/avoidant voice may sound like,“I want to be in connection and I also need time alone. I feel unclear about if I want to be alone or with you, so I vacillate and feel confused.”
As adults we may find ourselves in unconscious behaviors of push and pull. We seek connection with someone, and once we know they want us back, our desire wanes and we impulsively push them away. We crave connection and simultaneously we feel a need to withdraw from it.
Studying our attachment states invites us home into our wholeness
Studying your relationship to attachment and intimacy opens a field of possibility to integrate and escort exiled parts of yourself back home.
Exploring our attachment states will show us how safe we’ve learned to feel in our bodies, in our relationships with others, and in the world, and whether we have a strong and resilient nervous system that allows us to self-soothe alone or in connection, or whether we have difficulty self-regulating and staying in relationship when under emotional stress
We are born to love and feel safe inside of ourselves and with others, emotionally and physically, but for many this journey has been rocky and complicated.
Some of us experience the process of early bonding as filled with more confusion and pain than love. Many of us have created layers of protection in childhood to keep our vulnerable and innocent hearts safe. I’m one of those people, and my journey to bond, trust and surrender into love has been an ongoing experiment and exploration.
Early attachment templates set the course for how we relate to bonding, and our capacity to surrender into trust with others. Patterns of protection can make it harder to bond in deep and trusting ways as adults. The process of healing these wounds is delicate and requires heaping doses of self compassion, personal responsibility, support, and grace.
Our unique dance and relationship to how we bond or avoid attachment needs to be held with compassion and understanding.
Whatever attachment state you find yourself in, I hope you can approach these behaviors with compassion and curiosity. They represent an opportunity to witness your intelligent attempt to resolve a missing experiences you had in childhood.